by Heidi Pitlor
Santa Cruz. The idea came to Lovell as if from nowhere. When was the next time he would be on the West Coast? The conference was in a different city each year. Santa Cruz had to be a reasonable drive from here.
When the seminar was finished, Lovell returned to his hotel room and found Doug Bowen’s contact information through Shadow Noize. He sent off an e-mail introducing himself and suggesting they meet, as he was “in the area.” Doug soon replied and agreed.
Lovell called his mother and she agreed to stay at his house an extra night. “Good luck with the seminar this afternoon,” she said.
He had forgotten that it was just an hour from now. “Thanks, Mom.”
“Have you seen Dot Schlage there yet?” Dot Schlage taught undergrad planetary science at MIT. She had grown up in the town next to Lovell’s, and before he met Hannah, his mother used to suggest that he ask her out. Dot was nice enough and not unattractive, but she spoke so quietly he could hardly hear her most of the time. She seemed unable to look him in the eye; rather, she held her gaze at his forehead whenever the two spoke. “She’s at the conference, you know.”
“Mom.” It felt perverse, his mother even mentioning Dot’s name right now.
“I see her all the time at MIT. We have lunch sometimes. Just tell her I say hi, would you?”
THE NEXT MORNING, he checked out of his hotel and left Los Angeles as the sun rose, coral and golden, over the buildings and hills. He took a window seat near the back of the Greyhound, and as he had hardly slept the night before, he drifted off into a dreamless sleep until the stop at Santa Barbara.
The bus filled and he shifted toward the window to make room for a suntanned college-age girl who wore a bandanna over her head and carried only a ratty copy of On the Road. Lovell found his laptop, plugged in his headphones, and clicked on the website for Shadow Noize Records. He reread the short paragraph describing the company’s early days: “We set up in the basement of the Clover Club and we just recorded live records at first. That was our thing, capturing the raw energy of live music.” Beneath the words were covers of new albums released by the small label. He listened to samples of a few singles. The lyrics were stunningly violent and misogynist and materialistic. He felt old and prudish. He hoped his kids never heard this crap. He wondered if Hannah ever had.
He took off his headphones and set his head against the window. He closed his eyes and tried in vain to fall asleep again. The suntanned girl made little noises of delight as she read.
He thought back to a nor’easter years earlier. A plow had shoved an immovable wall of snow against Hannah’s car outside his apartment building and the storm had shut down the nearby subway system. They walked several miles from Cleveland Circle, where they had seen The Doors, and now, covered in wet snow themselves, they stood outside the door of his building, trying to spot where her car had once been and assessing the possibility of her going anywhere right then.
He offered his couch and she suggested his futon. “Less chance to hear Paul’s trombone from your bedroom.”
Maybe there is a God, he had thought.
In his room, as they changed with their backs to each other, Hannah into a shirt and sweatpants that he gave her, Lovell’s face burned: what must she have thought of his Star Wars pillowcase, the stench from the open bag of Doritos on the floor beside his bed? She herself mentioned a rubber night guard just prescribed for bruxism—“Be glad you don’t have to see me wearing it,” she said generously as she fluffed Yoda and Obi-Wan beneath her head.
Lovell and Hannah soon lay on their backs, and he watched the white dust sink and dance past the streetlights outside.
She finally broke the silence: “We are in bed together. I’m wearing your old undershirt. Say something.”
I love you, he thought. “Something.”
“Ask me a question. Anything you want.”
He scrambled to think of something daring, the sort of question that she might ask. “What is your biggest regret in life?” he thought to say. “What are you the most proud of?”
She answered and then countered easily: “Describe your first time having sex.” “What’s the angriest you’ve ever been?” “Have you ever been arrested?” His answers were embarrassingly tame next to hers. She regretted turning down a romantic advance from “a very well-known actor who shall remain nameless” when he was in Boston a few years ago. She was proud that she and Doug had surfed some deathly wave in Oahu. She had lost her virginity on her father’s boat when she was fourteen to a twenty-year-old neighbor, home from college at the time; she’d had a threesome on a beach in North Carolina. In turn, Lovell regretted never having known his mother’s parents, who had her when they were older and died before Lovell was born. He was proud that he was on his way to a PhD. He had made love with three women before now, each one in his dorm room. The angriest? “Probably when you told me about Doug.”
“That was your angriest?” She smiled and brushed a spot of lint from his cheek. “You’re sweet. You’re just you,” she said. She held her finger against his face for a brief moment before pulling back.
He made himself edge forward and say, “Can I?”
She nodded. He took her face in his hands—the face he had pined for all these months. Hannah Munroe’s face. He pushed his lips against hers, and spinning inside, weightless, he kissed her. They kissed each other.
After, she buried her face in her hands.
“You all right?” he asked.
She shrugged and wiped her eyes. “I’m fine. This is good—you are good.”
Was he her first since Doug? “Should we stop? Did I do something that you didn’t want to?”
“No, no. Please, you’re fine. This is fine. Just don’t go anywhere.”
“I won’t,” he said, reaching for a hair that clung to her eyelashes. “I’m right here.”
OVER NINE HOURS after he had left Los Angeles, the bus pulled into the station in Santa Cruz. Lovell hauled his bags from the metal rack above him, stepped down the cramped aisle and steep stairs, and stood blinking in the hazy sunlight of the afternoon. A few others disembarked behind him, and he moved to the side and glanced at his watch—he had just enough time to check into the motel, a block away from here, and walk to meet Doug.
Rocco’s Diner, a place Doug had suggested, was a steel double-wide with a scene of a nearly 3-D psychedelic goddess Roller Derby air-painted across its front. Lovell realized he had been standing in the parking lot, staring at the tacky mural for minutes now, the buxom, winged women gliding toward him through a purple rainbow and haloed black sun.
The diner was nearly empty. A couple of teenagers sat chattering loudly in a booth. And there at another torn booth, by the restroom, facing Lovell, sat a bald man with a black-and-gray goatee and a pierced eyebrow, a mug in his hands as he chatted with a waitress who had a short Mohawk. “Doug?” Lovell said from behind the waitress.
“My brother,” Doug said, standing to hug him as if he had known him for years. He muscled Lovell past the waitress and into his arms for a powerful hug. “How you holding up?” he said.
“I don’t know,” Lovell said as he lowered himself into the booth. He edged past a rip on the seat where white fluff burst from the vinyl. “Thanks for agreeing to meet.”
“No need to thank me.”
Lovell reminded Doug that it had been twenty days, three weeks, since Hannah had disappeared. “Unbelievable.”
“I bet.”
For some reason he said, “People recognize me from the news.”
“I’m sure it’s totally fucked with your mind.” Doug began to flick at his eyebrow ring.
Lovell tried not to watch. He kept his eyes on the chipped laminate tabletop and thought about the best way to respond.
“I’ve been lucky,” Doug said. “Never had to deal with anything like that.”
“Well, you do—you did know her.”
Doug laughed. “I stand corrected. You have kids? They OK?”
Lovell wondered how much—or
how little—Doug already knew from the news or mutual friends. Or from Hannah herself? “We have a son and a daughter. Ethan and Janine.”
“Nice. I have a boy, five. D. J., Doug Junior. Not my idea, mind you, his name. I wanted strong and easy, maybe Max or Nick.” The waitress returned to bring coffee and water and take their orders, and when she left, he continued. “I never got married.” At last he dropped his finger from his eyebrow.
“I’m sure you know that I met Hannah just after you two, after you—”
“I was glad she found someone to take care of her.” Doug squinted at Lovell. “I didn’t deserve her. I loved her, I really did. We were wild about each other, but I sure didn’t deserve her.”
“Well, it’s history, I guess. Water under the bridge.” Lovell was thankful for clichés. This was no time for a heartfelt connection. The transfer of information—that was all he needed.
“What’s it been, seventeen years now since me and her? We’re getting to be old men, brother.”
Lovell tried to sound casual. “You ever, you know, see her over the years?”
“I been out here for fifteen years now.”
Why would this person be honest? What would he have to gain? “I mean, OK, I’ll be specific. You weren’t in Boston on that day. You didn’t see her the day she went missing?”
Doug’s pale eyes widened. “I haven’t seen Hannah Munroe since the time she nearly took out my tooth with the engagement ring that I got her.”
His use of her maiden name, the near laugh as he spoke. Lovell’s temperature spiked. “Your proposal, I mean, on the beach. You have to know that’s where her wallet and a bracelet were found.”
Doug took a long swig of his orange juice and smacked his lips. “No shit. Really?” He ran his hands gently over his bald head as if it were a baby. “That’s right. Carson, was it?”
Lovell reached for his coffee. He had of course hoped to manufacture a reason for Hannah to drive to Carson that day—a reason other than himself. Someone to help shoulder the blame. “Something like this can really make you crazy.”
Doug nodded.
The waitress came back with their plates of food, and it occurred to Lovell that a quick coffee somewhere might have been a better idea. A towering club sandwich sat before him, a heap of curly fries to the side.
“So,” Doug said, reaching for his avocado wrap, “you like LA?”
“I didn’t get to see much of it,” Lovell replied. He tried to chat lightly about his work and the conference. He told him about the intensity seminar and the crowd that it had drawn. “This power index that I’ve been working on is kind of a big deal—” Lovell said. As he went on, he took in Doug’s aging but boyish face and gray-gold eyes. Doug popped a bite into his mouth and half smiled at Lovell—an impish, disarming smile. What would it be like to have such a smile? To be charming without having to say a thing? Lovell told him about his column at Weather. “I probably get ten letters a week about it. Too many to answer, really.” Doug nodded as he listened, interjecting “Nice” or “Good for you.” He was, of course, just humoring him.
Lovell took a few bites of his sandwich, skipped his lukewarm coffee, and waited for Doug to finish his wrap. When he finally did, he reached into his back pocket for his torn leather wallet and slid a faded credit card from one of its pockets. “My treat. Least I can do, right?” Doug said. He stood and reached out a tattooed hand and said, “I gotta talk to her for a sec,” gesturing toward the waitress. “So I’m gonna say good-bye.” He again looped an arm around Lovell’s back and folded him into his chest. “Keep on keeping on, OK? You do what you have to do. And if you ever need anything from me, you’ve got my info.”
Lovell eased away. “Sure, all right. Thanks.” He strode to the door and let it bang shut behind him.
He walked at a brisk clip across the lot and back toward the motel, just a few minutes away, trying to convince himself that coming here had not been an enormous waste of time.
His room reeked of cigarette smoke and rot, some kind of mold or something. He hadn’t noticed it so much earlier. He heard a woman hacking in the next room, a man somewhere talking, and the buzz of a radio or TV. He took a seat on a heavy wooden chair in the corner just as the phone rang. It was his mother, saying that he should come home as soon as he could. “That detective called. He said he had no idea that you were in LA. He needs you to go down to the station and he wouldn’t tell me why.”
Chapter 10
Once back from Ethan’s school, Hannah headed to the kitchen and scrubbed the breakfast dishes. She wandered upstairs and into her bedroom, where she drew the shades and tidied the bed and fluffed the pillows in an effort to make the room feel less like a war zone. She stepped into the bathroom. It smelled of perfume still, the perfume that Sophie had brought her from Paris and that Lovell had now gone and trashed. At least he had thought to clean it up. At least the bathroom would smell like Coco for another day or so. Then she would stop and notice that the scent had faded and remember that she could not afford to buy any more. She couldn’t stand to be in this room any longer. She couldn’t stand this rage.
She closed the door behind her and walked down the hallway to neaten up the kids’ bedrooms. She sat on Ethan’s bed and smoothed his soccer-ball quilt around her. She set his koala beside his pillow. On his first day of preschool, she had inhaled those few hours to herself. It had seemed like a decade since she’d had a moment alone. She had stretched out on an Adirondack chair in the backyard and noticed the clouds as if for the first time, gauzy like spun sugar low in the sky. She had flipped through a magazine and breathed in each perfume ad—pungent musk, lilac and lavender, black cherry—and then had called Sophie to say hello. Having nothing to report had been a luxury.
She walked downstairs to the kitchen now. She picked up the phone and dialed Sophie’s number at work. “I thought I’d just call to say hi like I used to,” Hannah said.
“Oh. Is everything all right?”
“Sure. What are you doing right now?”
“Specs for a print ad,” she said. She was single-handedly overseeing ad campaigns for Blue Cross and Blue Shield and for the Gap. “Are you really OK?”
“Absolutely. Let’s get together soon.”
“We have plans, all of us, for this weekend, no?” Sophie asked.
Hannah had meant that just the two of them should go somewhere they might have gone before having kids—see an old movie at the Brattle or wander around a used-book store. “I guess so. I forgot.”
“We’ll think of something fabulous.”
“We will,” Hannah said. “We got into it again last night, me and Lovell.” She considered telling Sophie that she thought Lovell had a crush on her.
“Oh?”
“You have to work. I should let you go.”
“I’ll call you on my way home later. I’ll call you as soon as I leave the office. You’ll tell me then?”
“Sure,” Hannah said.
But what would be the point of rehashing it all? What would that change? This was her life, this was her marriage. No one had forced her into it.
Lovell had stunned her by proposing on her father’s boat with her parents looking on. He had never mentioned marriage before. She could not exactly say no. Nor did she want to.
Later, when he suggested a short engagement, maybe a wedding on the Vineyard, nothing elaborate, just a meaningful gathering of their favorite people, Hannah had agreed. Too much time and she might change her mind. She was ready to be married. She wanted to be done with all the heartbreak that happened when you weren’t married.
“We don’t really talk anymore,” she had said to Lovell about two weeks ago. God, she had become a broken record with him.
“Sure we do.”
“Not really.”
He looked over at her from his laptop, the comforter tented over his legs.
“OK,” he said. “So, I’ve got this idea to write up these scenarios, these stories about people and how w
e harm the climate without realizing it.”
“Yeah?”
“I could write a monthly column for the magazine. I’d trace one atom as it travels. The atom would be like the—I don’t know—the protagonist or antagonist, depending on what happens, and in each column, I’d set out this different scenario.”
She wondered how such a thing as an atom—anything other than a person, really—could be made a compelling protagonist. But she knew better than to question his approach to his work. The few times she had, he had gently shut her down. What did she know about the movement of atoms or the physics of climate change?
“I could write about forest growth or I could set it in different countries—China, all the pollution. And I’d show people exactly how the gas that they buy or their TV or whatever—I’d show exactly what impact these things have on the earth. How one molecule of carbon actually moves and where it goes once it’s emitted, what happens to it and everything around it. It’s not hurricanes, it’s not what ME has me doing, but that’s the point. Try something different, maybe for the layperson rather than just the people who already know this stuff. I think I’ll put some feelers out. I can e-mail my editor, see what he thinks about it.” He finally turned back to his computer. “I have so much work to finish tonight.”
Talk, she nearly said. Not a talk. I did not ask for that.
She still had time before work. She could go food shopping, though there was enough in the refrigerator to last the next several days. She could fold the kids’ laundry and get the car washed and return some library books. She had enough time for a nap, but then she would have to summon the energy to extricate herself from the warm bed.
Or she could do something else. She could do something that she had never done—drive to a part of town where she had never been, pretend to be someone that she was not. A lifetime ago, she and Doug used to close their eyes and set one fingertip on a map of Massachusetts, some town, ideally a place where they had never been. They would gather the map and her keys and, on the way, choose identities for each other. Once, at a beachside diner in Revere, she and Doug pretended to be a movie star and an army sergeant visiting from Texas.